Profile
Abstract
Nenad Stefanov is a research associate in the DFG project "Belgrade and Zemun as a historical mobility space between two empires, 1739-1878" since January 2024.
Previously research coordinator at the Interdisciplinary Center for Transnational Border Studies "Crossing Borders" at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Substitute and visiting professorships at the University of Leipzig and the University of Vienna.
Main research interests: Interrelation between mobilities and borders in Southeast Europe. Transfers of ideas, history of entanglement between East and West. Societal history of Serbia and Bulgaria in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Selected publications:
Together with Florian Riedler: The Balkan Route: Historical Transformations From Via Militaris to Autoput, Berlin: De Gruyter 2021.
The Invention of Borders in the Balkans. From a late Ottoman region to nation-state peripheries: Pirot and Caribrod 1856-1989. Wiesbaden 2017
Professional career
- 03/2023 - 06/2023
- 10/2017 - 03/2018
- 06/2016 - 05/2022
- 02/2015 - 05/2016
- 02/2011 - 01/2017
- 10/2007 - 05/2010
At the moment I am working with Florian Riedler on spaces of mobility between two empires, namely Zemun and Belgradde in the period from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. We are particularly interested in the interaction with the transportation route from Istanbul, which connected Central Europe and Asia Minor in various eras and which became known as the Via Militaris, or Orta Kol, during the Ottoman period, eventually gaining prominence with the Orient Express.
Another research focus is the social production of borders. It were authoritarian and populist movements in Yugoslavia in the 1980s that forced new forms of demarcation on the basis of ethnically homogeneous communities. The subsequent materialization of such ethnic demarcations, their dominance, emerges from the same conflictual societal processes in which authoritarian patterns of action become hegemonic.
In this context, I am interested in the exchange on analyzing forms of authoritarianism between intellectuals from Yugoslavia and the Federal Republic of Germany, specifically between the philosophy of Praxis and critical theory.